Observations on what’s getting downvoted, with some dissected specimens

A look at the greatest misses of late, and some theorizing.

Happy Sunday everyone. This is a two-part post in which I explore a few of the most downvoted posts from the past week, as well as offer some observations about what kinds of things we're seeing downvoted generally. We remain committed to understanding how the system is working, so that we can make changes to improve it. By and large, we believe that the signal-to-noise ratio has increased, but we also note that some quality posts have not received recognition.

Below are the most downvoted posts from the last week. We won't make a habit of looking at these, and I'm not going to mention the authors' names, or link to them in context. The idea isn't to shame anyone, start a pile on, or anything of the sort. Rather, I thought it would be a good idea to share some insight into why a few comments received the votes they did.

The comments

"This is fantastic news! Who cares about worldwide hunger when we can spend trillions playing with rocks on Mars?!"

There are many reasons this post was downvoted, chief among them that the author has engaged in extreme hyperbole in a rather off-topic manner. As another reader points out later in that same discussion, NASA's budget is nowhere near trillions of dollars, nor is NASA's budget anywhere near enough to address worldwide hunger. Long story short, this is a troll post, and the readers weren't interested. As I'll expand upon in part II below, this post is of the "but I don't even have a TV" archetype.

The next post only rated -115 votes, which is still far beyond the -20 votes needed to collapse a post. But in this instance, the moderators also got involved. The story was "Too little, too late: Blockbuster gives up on trying to beat Netflix." The post in question looks to place the blame for Blockbuster's failure, but does the poster blame Blockbuster's lack of innovation, its customer service, or the difficult transition from being a brick-and-mortar to an Internet service provider? No, this poster decides to engage in some off-topic political trolling:

"Another victim of the Obama economy. If they can survive through inauguration day there are brighter skies ahead."

Unfortunately, another poster decided to take the bait, and once again the moderators got involved. This troll counter-fired,

"Judging by your comment, you must be the spawn of Mitt Romney. It takes intelligence to troll. Ignoramuses on the other hand..."

This post, coming later in the thread, achieved -45 votes. Both posters earned a temporary vacation from posting.

Our review of the new XCOM game certainly brought forth readers eager to downvote substance-free griping, and a few readers eager to provide that griping. The most downvoted post in the thread rated a -50, presumably because it, too, was substance free, with a dash of personal attack.

"Another Ars apologist review. This game is stream-lined, dumbed down, and XCOM in name only."

Apparently most readers were happy just to vote it down and move on to more interesting comments.

The same situation appears to be true of an all-too-common troll at Ars Technica: the one wherein all users of a certain OS or smart phone are branded as idiots/poor people/dorks/etc. This particular specimen appears in the thread under the story, "Survey says: iPhone 5 owners not bothered by iOS 6 Maps—are you?" In fact, there was a bit of a contest to see which trolling posts might take top honors as most downvoted in the thread. Weighing in at -67 was this pointless gem:

"When people buy a phone because they have more money than sense, you can wonder why a broken feature doesn't bother them."

Not far behind at -65 was another similarly brilliant post:

"Wait, many Apple users don't about anything except making sure they have the latest version so their friends will be impressed? Put that up there with water being wet."

These are, of course, classic, substance-free trolling posts. Personal attacks are not permitted at Ars, and when personal attacks morph into wholesale attacks on huge groups of people, they are even less tolerable. Intelligent discussion does not arise from them, because there's nothing of intelligence in them in the first place. And nota bene to the readers who think there is intelligence in them: find another site to read. Better yet, find a time machine and go back to the mid-90s when it was at least fashionable to troll usenet with this kind of stuff.

Emerging Trends

As we keep an eye on the most downvoted posts on the site, a few trends are clearly emerging. Certain kinds of posts are absolutely going to get downvoted. Here's a typology of bad posting behaviors, with an explanation/theory behind each of their arguments. It's a work in progress.

Son of the "I don't even own a TV" guy: This is the poster who thinks other people will find it interesting that he cares nothing about their discussion or their interests, and in fact judges himself as somehow morally superior as a result. The morphology of this on Ars Technica includes people popping into threads about Windows 8 to proclaim how they will never use Windows, people popping into threads about iOS 6 to proclaim that they never have and never will buy an Apple product, and people popping into Android related threads and claiming that they will never purchase "crappy plastic phones." In these cases, the posters have failed to understand that no one really cares what their personal disposition is on something, if they have nothing to add to the discussion.

The "I only know how to speak in hyperbole" guy: This poster is not always trying to troll, but it often looks like it. This is the individual who cannot introduce nuance into their point of view, but instead must use superlatives and extreme language in what I can only assume is an attempt to get attention. They typically love phrases like "worst ever," "new low," "complete fail," "absolute best," "going downhill," and the like. The broad, sloppy brush is the favorite tool of this poster. Closely related to this poster is this fella:

The "anybody who X is/does Y" guy: It never ceases to amaze me how many posters are willing to take one small facet of someone's life or identity (say, their choice in OS), and extrapolate from that all manner of ethical and moral criticisms, or perhaps more commonly, someone's intelligence.

The "Ars Technica is the worst site ever but I'll be back again tomorrow" guy: There's a handful of readers who simply dive into our comments to chastise us about how horrible we are, but of course they come back day after day. A variation on this is the "I can't stand your Apple coverage" guy, who nonetheless reads all of the Apple coverage and comments on it. Ditto for science, ditto for gaming, and other areas of the site. We've definitely noticed that these sorts of posts are getting downvoted as well.

The "unpopular but sincere opinion" guy: This is the guy we are trying to figure out how to protect. In the absence of trolling, we would prefer to see differences of opinion respected, and I will say that for the most part, we have not seen heavy downvoting of people merely because of their opinions. In the few instances we've observed so far, unpopular opinions have been downvoted when they were accompanied by other off-putting factors, such as those listed above. But it is not uncommon to see a respectable but differing opinion sitting somewhere with -10 votes. On the one hand, that's not enough votes to put something in jeopardy of being collapsed, but on the other hand some readers are finding it demoralizing.

In all, we are pleasantly surprised by how well the system is working. It's not without its flaws, and we did note that this was an experiment from the outset. For the most part, we presently feel that collapsing a post is a suitable treatment for content that the community on the whole finds negative. Remember, to get to -20 votes, you have to have a net -20. Posts with 10 positive votes would thus require 30 negative votes, and so on. We are presently considering a few more tweaks to the collapse system, but we're not yet ready to discuss them. One thing is amazingly clear, however: readers are using the voting system in a very intense way. I believe we are close to seeing 20,000 votes a day, and that number has continued to grow each day we are publishing. Best of all, more votes are being cast up than down, which means the community is trying to lift what it likes best.

The "unpopular but sincere opinion" guy: This is the guy we are trying to figure out how to protect. [...] some readers are finding it demoralizing.

I haven't read all the comments (nor do I intend to try now that the comments are so numerous), but I think it is also important to remember the guy you are trying to protect may encompass the guy who also sometimes acts the ass in other comments.

Readers and active comment participants may be remembering the guy for his excessive display of unfriendly/incendiary comments elsewhere and find it easy to no-vote them; others might find it easy to down-vote them due to differing opinion.

In the end, I suspect the system is probably working even better than anticipated in many cases.

297 Reader Comments

We stand by that headline, and offer no apology for it. Regardless of the # of votes. We don't do our editorial by committee. Not only is it impossible post-facto, but you already have the power in this relationship. You can just chose not to read the editorial if you don't want to.

F yes. Ars has the best editors in the game and now it's obvious why. It starts at the top. I think most writers only dream of this kind of support.

With that in mind, I would like to second andyfatbastard's advice to change the downvoting collapsing limit from a hard value (no matter which it is) to a ratio between positive and negative votes. It's still not perfect, but a much better alternative in my opinion.

To be clear, what you're suggesting would still involve a "hard value." I think what you mean is "fixed difference threshold." And whether the comparator is a difference or a ratio, it could still be a fixed or dynamic threshold. And the formula for all this would involve several variables.

It is not evident that the voting algorithm needs to be so complicated.

The problem at hand is the quality of thread comments. The solution you're advocating doesn't solve that problem, it simply gives posts a score to be analyzed. Believe me, I'm deeply curious about my post scores and I would e competitive about it given the chance, but that's not what all this is about.

It's a simple matter of whether a simple majority finds the post to be useful or not useful. Gaming the system with complex metrics isn't necessary.

I am not sure I follow your reply. A fixed difference threshold would merely be positive votes-negative votes, right? If so, then it is basically the same as counting the number of negative votes. Something like "a comment with more than x% of its votes being negative" sounds less hard a limit than "a comment with x negative votes" or "a comment with x more negative votes than positive ones" to me. Also, whatever mechanism used to tally up the votes and perform actions upon them needs to be done only once for the implementer and is transparent to the voter, so I do not see the inconvenience in it being slightly more complex than it is now.

I agree the current quality of the comments is not something to be proud of, and maybe something needs to be done, but my contention is that, to me, this is not it. Still, it is a step forward, and I am hopefull that if something better is found then it will be used instead.

I think the system is good. I have not yet seen a hidden post with honest well thought out opinion, I have seen unpopular votes for unpopular positions but never have I seen it to the point of hidden. I think people will moderate the use of voting (giving upvoting to unagreed with unpopular positions) to allow unpopular to stay in view. People will moderate themselves and this will all work out for the better.

The people with unpopular opinions know they are unpopular and expect some negative voting, for the better it will force them to be thoughtful about their positions, with less boring fanboi'ism...making a better discussion.

That comment is nearly gone, but in the whole comments that was one of the few that wasn't posted by some arrogant 'sys-admin type' with his jolly jape about how he actually has time to waste trolling scammers rather than just (politely) putting the phone down and warning friends/relative, rather than a well written insight into what might drive some of the scammers beyond just money. I'm not saying cniru was right or wrong, just that I valued his alternative view. A view that now has -19 votes and is nearly gone.

Maybe people with popular opinions might be as well to question them too! Maybe more so?

I'm not sure what your complaint about his post or the voting is about. He's complaining about the history of British Imperialism in India, and ranting that Western society is morally and ethically corrupt. In a thread about Indian scammers. It's off topic and not at all relevant to the discussion, and why it's hidden.

I'm not a fan of voting so I will simply ignore it as much as possible.

On a related topic, what I would like to be able to do is ignore or highlight particular threads. I often find that a thread is not interesting to me (even when it is well written and insightful) because it is too technical or focuses on an aspect of the article I'm not interested in.

Similarly, I may find that I'm particularly interested in a thread and would like to be able to highlight it so I don't miss parts of it.

I realize that this has the potential to require maintaining a significant amount of per-user information, so I wouldn't have a problem with being limited to a maximum number of "watches" site-wide. When I hit the maximum, the oldest "watch" would be dropped.

One way to accomplish your aims is to subscribe. With subscription, you can bypass the voting completely by viewing the front page threads in the openforum. Within the openforum, you also have the ability to use the egosearch to keep track of threads you are actively participating in.

I'm not a fan of voting so I will simply ignore it as much as possible.

On a related topic, what I would like to be able to do is ignore or highlight particular threads. I often find that a thread is not interesting to me (even when it is well written and insightful) because it is too technical or focuses on an aspect of the article I'm not interested in.

Similarly, I may find that I'm particularly interested in a thread and would like to be able to highlight it so I don't miss parts of it.

I realize that this has the potential to require maintaining a significant amount of per-user information, so I wouldn't have a problem with being limited to a maximum number of "watches" site-wide. When I hit the maximum, the oldest "watch" would be dropped.

This requires that you get off the front page and into the forums, but the information is already being tracked.

In the forums, the My Threads link will take you to a list of all threads that you have posted in. You can also watch threads from the forum view, you just have to find the article comment thread in News and Discussion and select Watch topic.

I realize that this has the potential to require maintaining a significant amount of per-user information, so I wouldn't have a problem with being limited to a maximum number of "watches" site-wide. When I hit the maximum, the oldest "watch" would be dropped.

You actually can do this by going to the forum view. Here Is a link to the "News and Discussion" main page. Click on the comments of the story you want, and then when you're in the thread view, at the bottom left of the comments are two links, "watch topic" and "bookmark topic".

In normal format, you can also select "notify me when a reply is posted". It's a bit more archaic, but it still works.

On the other hand, if voting can play a role in mitigating the atrocity that was the reader comments on the "Ars staffers exposed: our home office setups" article, I'm willing to try it. I thoroughly enjoyed that article, and what happened in the comments was just plain sad.

Well, in instances like that we could have a "put up or shut up" rule. If you have something to say, post your own setup and explain why it's better. Thus exposing _yourself_ to 17 pages of "OMG, what retarded impulse caused you to have mismatched monitors/waste so much space/choose such a crappy desk/have so many Macs/not have any Macs/whatever else there was because I've already forgotten."

I think the system is good. I have not yet seen a hidden post with honest well thought out opinion, I have seen unpopular votes for unpopular positions but never have I seen it to the point of hidden. I think people will moderate the use of voting (giving upvoting to unagreed with unpopular positions) to allow unpopular to stay in view. People will moderate themselves and this will all work out for the better.

The people with unpopular opinions know they are unpopular and expect some negative voting, for the better it will force them to be thoughtful about their positions, with less boring fanboi'ism...making a better discussion.

That comment is nearly gone, but in the whole comments that was one of the few that wasn't posted by some arrogant 'sys-admin type' with his jolly jape about how he actually has time to waste trolling scammers rather than just (politely) putting the phone down and warning friends/relative, rather than a well written insight into what might drive some of the scammers beyond just money. I'm not saying cniru was right or wrong, just that I valued his alternative view. A view that now has -19 votes and is nearly gone.

Maybe people with popular opinions might be as well to question them too! Maybe more so?

I'm not sure what your complaint about his post or the voting is about. He's complaining about the history of British Imperialism in India, and ranting that Western society is morally and ethically corrupt. In a thread about Indian scammers. It's off topic and not at all relevant to the discussion, and why it's hidden.

I didn't think it was off topic. I thought it provided an insight into problems in Indian culture that might hint at the root cause of the scamming problem (beyond money), that might then help a solution be found (not on Ars I guess). A solution beyond keeping the scammers on the phone for as long as possible that is.

I also thought he pointed out a double standard between how we are reacting to the scammers and why they are acting the way they do.

Yes, maybe it was slightly offtopic, but it added to the overall flavour of the article and the comments for me. I learned more by considering his point of view than the many other comments on 'how to troll a scammer'. I thought we didn't like trolls here anyway!

Seemingly I was wrong according to the voting, and I guess we all look for different things from the comments.

A lot of trolls have sincere but unpopular opinions. The problem is that they put things in such an annoying way that they derail the thread.

Having comments completely disappear is quite radical, but then I guess discussions do get derailed quite often at Ars. In the end it's the editors' call.

If it were a sincere opinion, it wouldn't be trolling.

thefreedictionary.com/sincere1. Not feigned or affected; genuine: sincere indignation.2. Being without hypocrisy or pretense; true: a sincere

Both of these definitions are mutually exclusive from the concept of trolling, which is based on the pretense of sparking a reaction, and not actually conveying an opinion.

To summarize, trolling isn't a word you throw around as a weapon when you are utterly intolerant of another opinion, even though it's widely used that way, skewing what people think of the word. A sincere opinion is not trolling, because they are mutually exclusive terms, opposites even.

Ideally, neither. You have a unique perspective, one that clearly a lot of people didn't agree with, but you explained what you thought, and did it without insulting. I can't say that you've convinced me of your ideas, but that's okay! There doesn't have to be consensus for a discussion to be meaningful.

I'm sure everyone has noticed by now one can vote on staff posts. Can they be made to collapse and more importantly would that be a message the powers that be would live with?

Wait, what? Sure you can. I just logged into my test account (no special admin powers, no subscriber features, basic account) to verify even. Was able to vote on one of Ken's posts no problem. We haven't shut down voting on staff posts.

Well aside from the fact it's a bit superfluous, the "you can collapse the mods" message really isn't one you want for staff.

On a related topic, what I would like to be able to do is ignore or highlight particular threads. I often find that a thread is not interesting to me (even when it is well written and insightful) because it is too technical or focuses on an aspect of the article I'm not interested in.

Similarly, I may find that I'm particularly interested in a thread and would like to be able to highlight it so I don't miss parts of it.

I realize that this has the potential to require maintaining a significant amount of per-user information, so I wouldn't have a problem with being limited to a maximum number of "watches" site-wide. When I hit the maximum, the oldest "watch" would be dropped.

This requires that you get off the front page and into the forums, but the information is already being tracked.

In the forums, the My Threads link will take you to a list of all threads that you have posted in. You can also watch threads from the forum view, you just have to find the article comment thread in News and Discussion and select Watch topic.

Thanks for the feedback. I should also clarify that by "thread" I mean a particular set of responses within the overall reply stream for an article.

The problem with this is that I need to post in the thread to be able to follow it this way. Quite often the threads that I want to follow are those that I'm learning something from and so I don't have anything to contribute. I could do a "+1" post to "attach" myself to the thread, but this only adds clutter.

This also does not provide me with a method of ignoring threads that don't interest me.

The article was about downvotes, because 90% of the complaints about the system are about the downvotes. Should be pretty obvious.

Just out of curiosity... how are these complaints relayed? Do people actually email mod@ars or is there a thread somewhere that I've missed? I always find it surprising that people can be so worked up about some internet argument that they'll actually take the trouble to take it to email!

I probably get 100+ emails a day from Ars readers alone, about any old thing. Then there's the specific discussion thread when we introduced this, and then there is a feedback forum, as well as Twitter. Then, finally, a few random comments in threads here and there.

You've noted before that you're concerned about protecting your writers and their morale from the vitriol of the community. But then why subject commentators to that same vitriol at all? Your stance makes sense given your job as EIC (i.e. keep your employees happy and making changes that grow the site), but also has a touch of hypocrisy.

I want to protect everyone from the vitriol. I don't think I'm saying that one group deserves it and another doesn't.

That said, I think if you allowed people to come and stand behind your desk and allowed them to tell you to choke on a cock and die in a fire all day, you'd understand why it's a little different when it comes to the staff.

But in the end, my POV is that the scumbags who act like that towards the staff are also jerkoffs generally in the forums. So I prefer to focus on the discussion as a whole. That way, everyone benefits (except the trolls).

Ultimately, what does a positive / negative vote express? That someone else liked or disliked your opinion. In light of all the "popularity contest" protests, it makes me wonder, why do you post? (1) Is it to publish an opinion on a topic that awoke your interest? Or (2) to see what people think about your views? Or (3), to get a lot of +1, yay, head nodding?

If the answer is 1, you shouldn't be really concerned about the votes, since you've achieved your goal. You might expect some feedback and return it, spawning a discussion that will eventually lead to something constructive, or not, but ultimately be enjoyable for many people to read.

If it's 2, you've achieved your goal as well, no matter if you get positive or negative votes. It'll mean that someone else read your opinion and reacted to it, telling you in a simple manner, what they think about it.

If it's 3, what can I say, anything that is and will be done in order to make a comment section more enjoyable / readable / orderly / etc will be insufficient as long as you don't get that dose of support. My advice, start a cult or something similar (not speaking against religions here, just saying that faith is the ultimate yay-saying for the sake of it. It's how faith is defined). You'll always find people who will worship every word you say. In any case, you'll never find what you're looking for in a forum or comment section, so you might as well start looking for it somewhere else...

So the only Ars comments getting downvoted are made by guys? Or this article is blatantly sexist? (Joking).

I tend to upvote unoffensive comments that aren't obnoxious but have gotten downvoted for being boring/not entertaining/unpopular.

Someone suggested hiding the exact vote counts to prevent dogpiling - and I agree - but I would make a fuzzy indicator using either color (red, black, green) or something like negative-neutral-positive with 'neutral' being halfway to the negative value needed to collapse a post (currently -10) to the absolute value of that (10), so a 'neutral' ranking would be from -10 to +10, a negative rating would be <-10, and a positive rating would be >10.

This could help prevent dog piling, would prevent users with unpopular but not very polarizing opinions from being demoralized by the occasional downvote, and probably wouldn't discourage people from voting.

Sorry I haven't got time to read the comments (it's already monday morning here), but I just wanted to chime in. I've found myself being the "unpopular but sincere opinion" guy a few times, and it really does bother me.

When most of my comments are +5 or more, it's depressing to see -5 when my comment is, through my biased eyes, a perfectly valid and polite disagreement to the most common opinion here at ars.

The world would be a boring place if everyone had exactly the same opinion. How can we improve anything unless we are open to stuff we didn't know or hadn't considered? I love reading comments by people who I disagree with (as long as they aren't trolling or factually incorrect).

I've also found myself upvoting other comments, even when I disagree with them, just because I don't like the fact that their perfectly good comment is sitting below 0.

As far as I know none of my comments have actually been hidden, or if they have it took a very long time, so I guess you could say the system is working. But it does discourage me from posting anything that others are likely to disagree with.

I think the up/downvote counter needs to be hidden. Just stick with "fav post" and hiding things below a certain threshold. Or perhaps you could only show upvotes, not downvotes (as in, if someone gets 6 down votes and 2 upvotes, then the number presented would be 2 instead of -4), but still hide the post once it's real score reaches -20.

Also, I don't like how the first few comments in an article receive a wildly disproportionate amount of votes. The first page is full of "reader fav" and hidden posts, while it almost never happens on latter pages. There needs to be some kind of scaling (perhaps base it on the number of hits the main article received after their comment was posted?).

I'm not really a fan of the recent changes. To me, aesthetically, they are quite ugly and look somewhat thrown together. Comment voting is always an interesting idea, but doesn't always work well. If a comment always gets hidden after -20 votes, you clearly have the "controversial comment" problem. For example, a +0 -19 comment still shows, while a +100000 -100100 comment is hidden.

Also, comment moderation and voting is questionable. "Another victim of the Obama economy. If they can survive through inauguration day there are brighter skies ahead." What's so horrid about saying that you believe a business's failures is the result of bad economic policies of the president? Or, "Another Ars apologist review. This game is stream-lined, dumbed down, and XCOM in name only." He expresses his overall opinion about the game succinctly. Not every comment should have to be a book.

Finally, criticism of a site should almost never be removed by moderators in my opinion. This is for various reasons, but I think most people around here would probably agree with me based on the prevailing attitudes towards censorship around here.

A lot of trolls have sincere but unpopular opinions. The problem is that they put things in such an annoying way that they derail the thread.

I think the problem is separating the truly sincere from the concern trolls.

powtfunndop wrote:

Also, comment moderation and voting is questionable. "Another victim of the Obama economy. If they can survive through inauguration day there are brighter skies ahead." What's so horrid about saying that you believe a business's failures is the result of bad economic policies of the president? Or, "Another Ars apologist review. This game is stream-lined, dumbed down, and XCOM in name only." He expresses his overall opinion about the game succinctly. Not every comment should have to be a book.

The Obama comment is off-topic trolling. The end. Obama didn't kill the business, it's just some jerk off who can't pass up an opportunity to get a zinger in against that lib president.

I would agree with you about the XCOM comment, though. I tried playing it. and that's exactly what it is. It's just an unpopular opinion.

Anyway, I don't even know what the point of voting on comments is. Maybe it would be better to just have global user reputation instead, so everyone knows who the trolls are.

Please god no. Threaded comments are hard to read, and completely opposite of the way the rest of the site/forums work here. If you need to reply to a specific post, the quote function does that fine.

It's like having 5 or 6 (or more) different comment streams for each article.

Bingo. Threaded comments are a terrible idea - for real discussion it is paramount to see *all* comments in *chronological* order. If a particularly interesting issue comes up, you can take the discussion of that to the forums.

Something like "a comment with more than x% of its votes being negative" sounds less hard a limit than "a comment with x negative votes" or "a comment with x more negative votes than positive ones" to me. Also, whatever mechanism used to tally up the votes and perform actions upon them needs to be done only once for the implementer and is transparent to the voter, so I do not see the inconvenience in it being slightly more complex than it is now.

I certainly don't mean for people to do all the math themselves. Just to get that out of the way.

It's easy enough to follow. Whether people vote 100 to 50 to yield +50 tells you more than if they voted 2 to 1 to yield 200%. Yes, with a ratio, "Twice as many people valued this comment than didn't!" But that's a rather disingenuous claim to make when there's a small number of votes, compared with "50 more people valued this comment than didn't, out of 150 people."

Or to think about it practically, let's say three people vote up and one person votes down. Suddenly, "more than 20% of the votes are negative, time to hide the vote!" That's an awfully sensitive trigger when you have only four votes. So maybe let's raise the threshold? Let's set it to 80%. Well now you need 4 votes down out of 5 to collapse a post. If there are 100 votes, you have to get 80 down to collapse it. That's a lot of work, and it makes the voting way too IN-sensitive. So what do you do, put a curve? Under 10 votes, it's this ratio threshold, under 50, it's another, under 80 it's another, etc?

This is what I mean about it being unnecessarily complicated, implementing curves and multiple thresholds, when all you want to know is whether the leading consensus values a post or does not value a post, and by how much. To know what the value of the ratio means, you'd -have- to know what the volume of votes was, and what stage of the curve was applied. That's too much information and computation for not enough benefit.

I agree that it would satisfy the curiosity of the ego to know that 100 people are voting back and forth at each other over a post. But I don't agree that it actually helps solve a problem or contributes to the value of the voting system.

All that really matters is, how many more people value a post than don't.

If a comment always gets hidden after -20 votes, you clearly have the "controversial comment" problem. For example, a +0 -19 comment still shows, while a +100000 -100100 comment is hidden.

If only 19 people care to vote it down, then that tells us not enough people care to hide the post to make it hidden. Whereas if 100 more people vote it down than vote it up, then clearly the leading opinion is that it's hide-worthy.

In other words, five times as many people would rather not see the 200,100-vote post than would rather not see the -19 post. Hide-worthy.

Besides, what matters is whether more people value a post than don't, not how much it's agreed-with in a battle of opinion. I would be suspicious that a post with more than 200,000 votes has descended into the kind of "pissing contest" about which so many fears have been expressed.

Hence the discussion of the tyranny of majority, and factionalism. The goal of the system, I believe, is to highlight people making genuine contributions and to hide people causing disruption. A person expressing themselves, even if everyone disagrees with them, should be given a chance to speak.

I've also been trying to watch some of the voting in realtime, to get a sense of the "competition" that might occur over controversial comments. It's not encouraging. My original post here, the one that mentioned tyranny of the majority, was down-modded by 5 within minutes of my posting it... that knee-jerk reaction I cautioned.

Coming back to this discussion many hours later, I find that my comment's reputation has recovered to exactly zero. How did that happen? It was probably the result of a conscientious effort by a small minority of "comment paladins"; were those ARS staff or just fair-minded people equally concerned about that last class of commenter described in the article? What happens when those paladins aren't around?

In any case, it's certainly a thankless job cleaning up after the small-mindedness of others. Wouldn't it be more constructive to force those people to actually comment than to give them an easy and anonymous means of expressing that small-mindedness?

There are other comments here that I perceive as deserving that didn't get the same conscientious effort, though, like comment #23378533. And then there is a comment by "copernicum", which has been down-modded to the point of being faded, with the added evil twist that the quote-this-comment-in-reply button has been removed from his post, meaning that anyone intent on replying to his unpopular comment is now actually being deliberately discouraged from doing so, thus practically sealing the fate of his comment.

Addendum, another 5 hours in: I notice that the two comments I specifically linked above have been given a bit of remediation since I wrote about them, two and three votes respectively, so a few people are being retrospective; that still wasn't enough to get copernicum's comments out of the can't-reply-directly doghouse that he's in. His comment is still faded at -11 and the direct reply button is still absent.

We could get REALLY complicated with the math here. Every comment could get a % score where it is the number of upvotes divided by the number of unique pageviews. i.e. to get 100%, you would need everyone who viewed the comment page your comment was on to give you an upvote.

Notice that the downvotes don't count towards the %age - they remain as they are currently, where you get enough your comment fades, or collapses - but with comments rated above, say, 1% being protected.

(If there aren't enough people upvoting to ever get good % scores, you could multiply everyone's rating by a factor - but pick a factor such that 100% is usually unattainable - and obviously in the rare event that it goes over 100%, it should just display 100%).

Hence the discussion of the tyranny of majority, and factionalism. The goal of the system, I believe, is to highlight people making genuine contributions and to hide people causing disruption. A person expressing themselves, even if everyone disagrees with them, should be given a chance to speak.

I've also been trying to watch some of the voting in realtime, to get a sense of the "competition" that might occur over controversial comments. It's not encouraging. My original post here, the one that mentioned tyranny of the majority, was down-modded by 5 within minutes of my posting it... that knee-jerk reaction I cautioned.

Coming back to this discussion many hours later, I find that my comment's reputation has recovered to exactly zero. How did that happen? It was probably the result of a conscientious effort by a small minority of "comment paladins"; were those ARS staff or just fair-minded people equally concerned about that last class of commenter described in the article? What happens when those paladins aren't around?

In any case, it's certainly a thankless job cleaning up after the small-mindedness of others. Wouldn't it be more constructive to force those people to actually comment than to give them an easy and anonymous means of expressing that small-mindedness?

There are other comments here that I perceive as deserving that didn't get the same conscientious effort, though, like comment #23378533. And then there is a comment by "copernicum", which has been down-modded to the point of being faded, with the added evil twist that the quote-this-comment-in-reply button has been removed from his post, meaning that anyone intent on replying to his unpopular comment is now actually being deliberately discouraged from doing so, thus practically sealing the fate of his comment.

Thanks for your opinion. It is your judgements of others that gets you into trouble...people don't like to be called small minded, and your persecution complex is showing.

People will do what they do, in a group - mitigation will be done by others and in this forum this is allowed. It is a good system in my opinion. Nothing is perfect but this is good by allowing checks and balances of your peers.

The "unpopular but sincere opinion" guy: This is the guy we are trying to figure out how to protect. [...] some readers are finding it demoralizing.

I haven't read all the comments (nor do I intend to try now that the comments are so numerous), but I think it is also important to remember the guy you are trying to protect may encompass the guy who also sometimes acts the ass in other comments.

Readers and active comment participants may be remembering the guy for his excessive display of unfriendly/incendiary comments elsewhere and find it easy to no-vote them; others might find it easy to down-vote them due to differing opinion.

In the end, I suspect the system is probably working even better than anticipated in many cases.

I still think it is a broken system, one that could have been approached more simply and more transparently by issuing warnings and then bans of increasing duration. Too much workload for existing moderators? Make new ones.

Voting leads to groupthink. People are more likely to vote down what they disagree with, not what they objectively and dispassionately evaluate as a "bad" post.

Are you looking at voting focus, as in routine downvoting or upvoting of an individual by the same people? Stackoverflow does. Apparently voting rings and reciprocity are common. You don't know who voted you down for sure but it doesn't stop guesses. Nor does it stop you voting for your friends even when they say something stupid.

Still, your site, your rules. I'm not threatening to leave or anything, just wishing it was different. But I think you will lose many "unpopular but sincere" people, only I don't see those people as the type to write a goodbye last post.

The point is to prevent people from leaving the community, because the Ars comment threads were starting to descend into youtube/4chan territory.

Isn't that what moderators are for? If someone is trolling or being abusive, etc, then there should just be a way to flag the offending posts. This whole up and down vote thing isn't really necessary for that, since it makes no distinction between trolling/abuse/etc and unpopular but valid opinions.

ColinABQ wrote:

Malth wrote:

How do you establish reputation without voting, in one form or another? Where would you place the voting mechanism?

Well, obviously there would still need to be voting, and it could just be something next to the usernames. There are forums that have a rep system, it could just be a modified version of that.

...people don't like to be called small minded, and your persecution complex is showing.

Don't you think you're engaging in a bit of manipulative misframing here? Is being aware of how unpopular expressions are treated and wanting to discourage the mistreatment the same as a "persecution complex"? My post did not obsess over the handling of my own earlier comment; I used it as a reference but not an exclusive one. Was I not clearly more concerned, by my use of highlighting, about the treatment of another unpopular comment that wasn't my own?

Further, you said "people don't like to be called small-minded". Who did I accuse of being small-minded? Did I name any person, or even an identifiable group of persons? No. What I did was acknowledge the existence of small-minded people, even here at this site, and the consequences of their presence. Is that really such a shocking revelation? No. If someone I didn't even name becomes offended at my mere acknowledgement of small-minded people, then that person clearly has a genuine "persecution complex".

I still think it is a broken system, one that could have been approached more simply and more transparently by issuing warnings and then bans of increasing duration. Too much workload for existing moderators? Make new ones.

Voting leads to groupthink. People are more likely to vote down what they disagree with, not what they objectively and dispassionately evaluate as a "bad" post.

I think we all know forums with over zealous mods who power trip and go overboard, stifling thought. The point being that any system can be extrapolated to an extreme and unpleasant conclusion if you wish. Conversely, none of them are ever going to be perfect. Speaking as someone who *does* moderate the comments I'm actually very interested in what the community chooses to "moderate".

I think this whole idea is really great.I would think it would be even cooler if you had the option to set when the posts would collapse, even into positive values like the ability to say only show me the posts +10 or greater.This gives the community a large amount of power in the commenting realm , I hope that this does not become abused in the various means discussed and maybe we can avoid the great deal of complexity befallen other sites. Hopefully the staff will be able to "protect" a post for a sincere but unpopular guy to avoid the groupthink mindset setting in which is very undesirable to many people.

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.